Cons

Bottom Line

The GoPro Fusion lets you do more with 360-degree video than other cameras, but its software support isn't complete.

Feb. 9, 2018Jim Fisher

The GoPro Fusion sets itself apart from other 360-degree cameras thanks to high-resolution capture (5.2K) and software that leverages those extra pixels to pan, zoom, and display spherical video in a traditional frame. GoPro calls this OverCapture. It delivers pro results when used with desktop editing software, but the mobile experience isn't quite as polished as what we've seen from the competing Rylo. GoPro promises improvement in the future, and the Fusion's video quality is better, so we're rating it higher. With a little extra software polish it would be a near shoo-in for our Editors' Choice award.

Design

The Fusion takes it aesthetic cues from the Hero5 and Hero6. It's finished in the same two-tone dark gray look. The outer material feels the same too, a hard rubber shell that withstands drops and the rugged treatment that action cams are often subjected to. The Fusion is waterproof to 16 feet (5 meters).

The camera measures 3.5 by 3.0 by 1.0 inches(HWD) and weighs 8.0 ounces. There are two lenses, one on the front and another on the rear, slightly offset from each other to improve stitch quality. Physical controls are limited to Power/Mode and Record buttons. You can change camera settings using the two to navigate the menu, which is displayed on a small front monochrome LCD, or connect the Fusion to your phone and change settings via the GoPro app, available for Android and iOS.

The Fusion doesn't have a hard glass cover over its lens like the Hero6, though. Each of its lenses needs to see slightly behind themselves. The fish-eye nature doesn't lend itself to extra protection. That said, while I didn't try to scratch the lens, I haven't been overly careful with the camera either. A soft lens cloth does a fine job getting rid of smudges, and I reached for a disposable cleaning wipe after one of the family dogs licked the lens. GoPro does warn that scratches can happen, and includes a protective case with a soft inner lining to use for storage and transport.

It ships with a standard GoPro mount installed on the body. It's removable, and when it's off the Fusion can sit up on its own on a flat surface. GoPro also bundles a selfie stick/tripod combination with the camera, which is helpful. It lets you hold the Fusion farther away from your person when shooting, and set it up on its own so you can roll footage to stay out of a shot.

There are a couple of doors on the body. One hides the USB-C port, which is used for data transfer and charging. Another opens to reveal the removable battery and memory card slots. The Fusion requires you to use two microSD cards, one for each lens. You'll want to use cards with a Class 10 or UHS-I speed rating at a minimum, and we recommend using cards of matched speed and capacity to ensure that there are no hiccups during recording.

The removable battery is a higher capacity than you get with a Hero camera. We started at a full charge and ran it down to about 50 percent after recording 50 minutes of continuous 5.2K video. That just about filled dual 32GB cards, so you'll want to invest in larger capacities if you plan to take full advantage of the 100-minute battery life.

I noticed that the Fusion gets very, very warm when recording longer clips. I was recording test footage in a room temperature office, and the camera did not overheat to the point that it stopped recording. But if you're filming in very hot environments, be aware of just how warm the camera gets. We'll run some more long clip trials when we're able to get the camera into warmer surroundings—the northeast US in winter isn't conducive to making cameras overheat.

Desktop Software

Desktop editing tools, available for Mac and Windows system, include a pair of GoPro apps—Fusion Studio and VR Player—and a few plug-ins for Adobe Premiere Pro CC.

But before you work with footage in Premiere Pro you need to stitch it together. That's where Fusion Studio comes into play. It recognizes both the front and rear camera views captured by the Fusion and combines them into an equirectangular projection that's suitable for editing and uploading to hosting services that accept 360-degree video.

You have a few options for output—H.264 if you want to downsize footage to 4K, or CineForm 422 and Apple ProRes 422 for 5.2K. There are presets available that tune output for different purposes—Editing, Facebook, Vimeo, and YouTube. You can manually set the video resolution (5.2K, 4K, 3K, 2K) and choose between stereo or 360-degree directional audio. You can also enable stabilization when stitching footage, and you should. Despite being labeled as beta, it's staggeringly effective. (More on that later.)

There is also an OverCapture option in Fusion Studio. It's pretty limited—you can change the field of view of a clip and present it in a fish-eye or Little Planet projection, but it's locked in for the duration of the clip. You can clone and trim clips to your heart's content, creating several views from a single piece of footage, but animated movements using keyframes isn't an option.

That's where the Premiere Pro plugins come in. Nestled in the Video Effects panel, under the GoPro VR heading, are Horizon, Layers, and Reframe. Horizon is useful if you simply want to make sure that your 360-degree video is centered and shows a straight horizon.

For best results in straightening footage you'll want to keep your eyes locked on the GoPro VR Player window that launches automatically along with Premiere Pro. It simulates the view of a VR headset, and it's easier to get a straight horizon using that as a guide than Premiere Pro's preview window.

Layers is used to add text titles to video. Premiere has this feature built in, but using the GoPro distorts them so they'll look correct when displayed in a VR headset or player.

Reframe is where the magic happens. It's here you're able to zoom in and out of footage, transitioning from tight framing to an all-encompassing Little Planet look. And, by using keyframes, you can animate the movements. Set your field of view at one frame, enable animation for the effect you want to adjust, move down the timeline to another point, and make a change. Premiere Pro will smoothly animate the motion from start to finish.

I've only just started to work with Reframe, but found it to be very easy to use after a few minutes of fumbling around a few tutorials. And I'm not nearly as comfortable in Premiere Pro as a I am in Lightroom or Photoshop—if you're intimately familiar with Adobe's video editing suite, you'll pick it up in a snap.

Regardless of experience level, it is going to take some time to get results that are dramatic and compelling, like you see in GoPro's marketing footage. Adding some other tools native to Premiere Pro, like the ability to speed up or slow down your footage, in conjunction with the Reframe animation, will help to turn heads.

High Octane Computing

Working with the footage at its highest resolution is demanding. My 2013 MacBook Pro choked on playback within Fusion Studio. A 2015 Retina iMac, powered by a 3.5GHz Core i5 and loaded with 16GB of memory and Radeon Pro 580 graphics, took its sweet time stitching footage—30 minutes per one minute of stabilized CineForm 422 5.2K video—and Premiere Pro estimated that it would take five hours to output a five-minute 5.2K clip using HEVC compression and a 50Mbps bit rate, with quality set to High. (The Highest quality setting estimated 30 hours.)

I had better luck with a more modern system. A 2017 Retina iMac, powered by a 4.2GHz i7 CPU, also with 16GB of RAM, and more modern Radeon R9 M290X graphics, stitched video at a rate of 1 minute of footage every 5.5 minutes of CPU time. Exporting the same video clip at the same HEVC settings in Premiere Pro took about 3.5 hours. Thankfully both iMacs were able to play back the video without stuttering and stopping during editing, which is not the case with the aging laptop.

We also worked with the footage with Apple's newest desktop, the iMac Pro. The $5,000 handled footage easily, with silky smooth playback in Premiere Pro CC and shorter export times for our project. It rendered out the project in about 2 hours, a good hour and a half faster than the top-end configuration of the 2017 Retina iMac.

You'll want more than consumer-level specs in your editing system to handle the Fusion's video. Also be sure to invest in some big hard drives. Each minute of stitched CineForm 422 footage at 5.2K takes up about 4.5GB of space.

Mobile Editing

It's not all about the desktop. Many are going to use the Fusion on the road, and GoPro recently rolled out the first version of its mobile OverCapture experience. It's inclued in the GoPro app for Android and iOS devices. We tested it out using an iPhone 8 Plus.

The first step of editing on your phone is copying videos over. It's done via Wi-Fi, and takes about three minutes to transfer every minute of video. There's currently a bug that causes crashes when transferring longer clips in a batch, so you'll need to transfer videos one by one if you've got longer clips. GoPro is aware of this and working on a fix.

You'll also want to make sure that your phone has plenty of storage space available if you're doing any editing of longer videos. The Fusion breaks longer videos up into smaller files automatically, topping out at about seven minutes per file. But those seven minutes of video take up about 6.3GB of storage space and 21 minutes to copy to your phone.

Once you get the files over, you'll find that the mobile app is best for extracting and sharing short clips, as you don't get a robust editing timeline like you do on a desktop suite like Premiere Pro. GoPro makes it very easy to zoom in, change the field of view, or move to a Little Planet projection using the app.

To pan through the video you'll use the same gestures you've grown accustomed to for using your phone in general. Pinching zooms in, moving your fingers apart zooms out. You can swipe to change the angle of view, or tilt your phone to do the same. It's easy and intuitive, but it's more of a quick-and-dirty method compared with the elegance of the keyframe animation options in Premiere Pro. You can see the editing action in the screen recording embedded above.

You need to do everything in real time with the current version, pausing recording tells the app that you're done and ready to export the clip. This means that there's going to be a lot of trial and error to set the field of view and make your camera movements.

I spoke to GoPro about the status of the app and was told that improvements in the interface are coming. A spokesperson said, "The goal is to make it more polished and more easily accessible, for a wider range of people. So you can certainly expect to see big leaps in this space in our next few updates."

I'd love to see keyframes and automated camera movements added. Rylo does it in its app, utilizing force touch to set points of interest in the frame along a timeline and letting you pause and scrub back and forth through footage. There's a bit of a learning curve if you haven't worked with animation before, but once you get the hang of it, you'll be able to do more with the footage. GoPro isn't completely behind, however—with the Fusion you can move in and out of Little Planet in a single clip, something the Rylo software doesn't do.

Video and Image Quality

The Fusion sets itself apart from many other 360-degree cameras with its resolution. While we've seen a large swath recording at 4K, including the Ricoh Theta V and Nikon KeyMission 360. GoPro went for 5.2K, with a 30fps capture rate and 60Mbps compression rate.

Each lens picks up nearly 4K of resolution (7MP), but of course, there's overlap and black space around the circular image projected onto the rectangular image sensor. When stitched, video is 5.2K—12.5MP. Compare that with the Samsung Gear 360, which stitches together video that's 4K—8.4MP per frame. The Fusion has nearly a 50-percent advantage in pixel count.

It's the extra resolution that makes OverCapture something that's a useful feature rather than a gimmick. The 4K Insta360 One has a similar (but not as robust in movement or animation) crop option, but its cropped footage looks awful. Its video doesn't have enough oomph to handle it.

And it's the extra resolution that makes vanilla 360 footage, without any sort of OverCapture effect, look noticeably better than 4K models. GoPro's experience with video, and its ProTune system, which supports graded GoPro Color as well as a gradeable Flat profile, are also part of that. Of course, the Fusion isn't the only high-resolution option out there. We're currently working on reviews with a couple of cameras that shoot at 5.7K, slightly better the Fusion in resolution—the Garmin Virb ($800) and YI 360 ($500)—and will report on whether they better the Fusion once testing is finished.

We can't discount stabilization. The Fusion's is pretty fantastic. It's not done in-camera, though. But if you enable the option in the Fusion Studio software, you're greeted with footage that is incredibly smooth and steady. It even passed our torture test, delivering stable video when mounted to the vibrating hood of a farm tractor. Other cameras we put to the same test, including the Ricoh Theta V, delivered noticeably shaky results.

Stitch quality is generally quite good. Objects very close to the lens are going to disappear, as will the included selfie stick when extended—that's actually a nice feature, as it could be distracting in the frame. For the most part, as long as you don't have something too close to the side of the camera, stitching is seamless. I did notice some exposure differences between the lenses in some test shots, mainly when the sun was high in the sky. On grayer days and under blue skies without as much sun showing in the shot, exposure was balanced. There are some issues with chromatic aberration, only noticeable at parts of the scene toward the periphery of lens coverage. We see this with most 360 cameras, as the extreme fish-eye lenses needed for the format suffer at the edges of coverage.

GoPro recommends a 1080p output resolution for OverCapture videos. The resulting footage looks quite good; better than I expected in fact. Close-up details are sharp, so if you've mounted the Fusion to a subject you'll see clearly. Distant objects, which often appear blurry in 360-degree video, aren't deadly crisp, but they're not distractingly soft—just don't expect to zoom in too far.

The storytelling potential is more intriguing to me than whether or not the branches of a distant tree look crisp. OverCapture lets you direct the action in the frame. You've got individual control over the field of view, yaw, pitch, and roll of the video, as well as the ability to control how smooth transitions are. You can set keyframes far apart for slow, smooth changes in field of view, or closer together for quicker, more jarring adjustments.

You can push the camera to 60fps, but at a big cost in resolution—it drops to 3K. That's going to deliver video that looks soft to modern eyes. GoPro fans are used to high frame rates for insane slow-motion. We'll need much, much more powerful mobile processors to get there at the resolution needed for crisp 360-degree capture. If you need to shoot at 120 or 240fps, get a Hero6 Black.

The Fusion also shoots photos, stitched at 16.6MP (5,760 by 2,880), in JPG or Raw format. We're looking at it primarily as a video camera, but still quality looks solid to me. You can take advantage of the extra resolution offered by still imaging for video, as long as you're a fan of time-lapse, and also animate time-lapses in the same way as standard video footage using the Premiere Pro plug-ins.

Conclusions

GoPro wasn't nearly first to the 360-degree camera space, but the Fusion breathes some life into the medium. Yes, there's the initial whizbang factor of 360, and VR in general, but is it sustainable? Like fads that have come and gone—3D, I'm looking at you—it's wearing out its welcome. It's cool that you can capture the entire world around you in a single frame. But what does it add?

In most situations, the answer is nothing. You'll get a better story from traditional video. GoPro's solution is a sound one. With the Fusion, shooting in 360 makes a bit more sense. Extreme sports fans, many of whom love the GoPro brand, want to record and share what they're doing, but don't have the ability to change the camera angle in the middle of a stunt. With the Fusion you gain the ability to zoom out to an otherworldly view, and move tight to capture a specific bit of action, with smooth, automated transitions—as long as you edit on the desktop.

The mobile editing experience is a lot better now than when Fusion launched, but still needs some work. At the time of this writing you need to make all the camera movements in real time when editing on your phone, which makes smooth, careful animation a difficult proposition. GoPro promises to improve the software with updates.

The Fusion is an Editors' Choice candidate thanks to its overall video quality and build, but it's not quite there yet. We're still giving it a strong recommendation, especially for desktop editors. If you prefer a phone-based workflow, you can get good results with OverCapture, but not the same refined, smooth camera moves that you can manage with Premiere Pro. We'll update our evaluation as GoPro updates its editing tools.

About the Author

Senior digital camera analyst for the PCMag consumer electronics reviews team, Jim Fisher is a graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he concentrated on documentary video production. Jim's interest in photography really took off when he borrowed his father's Hasselblad 500C and light meter in 2007.

He honed his writing skills at retailer B&H Photo, where he wrote thousands upon thousands of product descriptions, blog posts, and reviews. Since then he's shot with hundreds of camera models, ranging from pocket point-and-shoots to medium format digital cameras. And he's reviewed almost all of them. When he's not testing cameras and gear for PCMag, he's likely out and about shooting with ... See Full Bio